Power shifted from something very visible and tangible, as Foucault states, to something ambiguous and latent. Power structures have intertwined in all sorts of ways throughout history within the system. Urbanization and conformistic patterns of expectation show numerous of examples within this. In The King is my Neighbour, Eri Vanluchene and Mirre Nimmegeers build a visual labyrinth for the viewer to get lost in. Through suggestive parings and associative imagery, they construct a closed off world full of references and symbols. Symbols that refer to ancient, large civilizations that the current government uses to preserve its past and implicitly claim its current power. Their series of photographs show a documentation of their search into the concept of power, but their answers remain inadequate. They rather show the conflictuous and psychological relation one can experience trying to reach for the concept. You can view the images through an indirect political lens, the politics embedded in the representation of the streets. Here the series forms a kind of labyrinth rich in references and symbols. But, as photographers, we are also just looking for a certain form of materiality, for interesting light situations and an ambiguous experience of time, which is no less the case here in this series. The photos are the language of our imagination, open, mysterious and frozen in time. We hope that the series generates a curiosity with the viewer and therefore raises questions. But we certainly do not have the pretension or objective of presenting an essay project, in which we take a clear position and want to implement a political preference.

Mirre Nimmegeers (°1995, BE) and Eri Vanluchene (°1997, BE) both graduated in photography and are currently attending the master program in photography at Sint-Lukas Brussels. From a shared working process and aesthetics, they started collaborating as a duo in 2017. Their interest goes towards the narrating qualities of the photographic series and the ambigious questions photography raises about the relation between fiction and non)fiction.